This introduction to Plato’s philosophical and educational thought examines Plato’s views and relates them to issues and questions that occupy philosophers of education. Robin Barrow stresses the relevance of Plato today, while introducing the student both to Plato’s philosophy and to contemporary educational debate. In the first part of the book the author examines Plato’s historical background and summarizes the Republic. Successive chapters are concerned with the critical discussion of specific educational issues. He deals with questions relating to the impartial distribution of education, taking as a starting point Plato’s celebrated dictum that unequals should be treated unequally. He examines certain methodological concepts such as ‘discovery-learning’ and ‘play’ and also raises the wider question of children’s freedom. He looks critically at the content of the curriculum and discusses Plato’s theory of knowledge and attitude to art. Finally Robin Barrow discusses Plato’s view of moral education and the related problem of what constitutes moral indoctrination

This book will help you to understand Badiou's central concepts, the philosophical relation between Badiou and Plato and will rethink the importance of Badiou's 'Platonic' claim that 'the only education is an education by truths'.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato's Cave, was presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a) to compare "the effect of education (παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter. The allegory is presented after the analogy of the sun (508b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d–511e). All three are characterized in relation to dialectic at the end of Books VII and VIII (531d–534e). Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality.

This collection of original essays pays tribute to the man by exploring topics that have interested him through a long and productive career. Plato's mathematical imagery, his theory of perception, the role of engineering techne in the origin of Greek science, time and free will in Kant, Whitehead as teacher of teachers, mapping friendships, Kierkegaard and the necessity of forgery. These and other topics are given fresh treatments meant to stimulate further philosophical thinking in the spirit of Brumbaugh himself.

This book develops for the readers Plato’s Socrates’ non-formalized “philosophical practice” of learning-through-questioning in the company of others. In doing so, the writer confronts Plato’s Socrates, in the words of John Dewey, as the “dramatic, restless, cooperatively inquiring philosopher" of the dialogues, whose view of education and learning is unique: (1) It is focused on actively pursuing a form of philosophical understanding irreducible to truth of a propositional nature, which defies “transfer” from practitioner to pupil; (2) It embraces the perennial “on-the-wayness” of education and learning in that to interrogate the virtues, or the “good life,” through the practice of the dialectic, is to continually renew the quest for a deeper understanding of things by returning to, reevaluating and modifying the questions originally posed regarding the “good life.” Indeed Socratic philosophy is a life of questioning those aspects of existence that are most question-worthy; and (3) It accepts that learning is a process guided and structured by dialectic inquiry, and is already immanent within and possible only because of the unfolding of the process itself, i.e., learning is not a goal that somehow stands outside the dialectic as its end product, which indicates erroneously that the method or practice is disposable. For learning occurs only through continued, sustained communal dialogue.

Three lines of argument are central to this book: that Plato's views as expounded in the Republic indicate that he was a utilitarian; that utilitarianism is the only acceptable ethical theory; that these conclusions have significant repercussions for education. Throughout the book the exposition of utilitarianism and the interpretation of the Republic are closely linked. The author assesses the nature of recent Platonic criticism and provides a critical summary of the Republic. He expounds and defends utilitarianismn and examines in greater depth the consequences for education of accepting a utilitarian position, showing how, for example, from this standpoint such key terms in educational debate as 'autonomy' and 'self-development' must be reassessed as educational objectives.

Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant short stories in nineteenth-century literature. They focus on the relationships between men and women, as in the poignant fantasy of 'A Parisian Affair', between brothers and sisters, and between masters and servants. Through these relationships, Maupassant explores the dualistic nature of the human character and his stories reveal both nobility, civility and generosity, and, in stories such as 'At Sea' and 'Boule de Suif', vanity, greed and hypocrisy. Maupassant's stories repeatedly lay humanity bare with deft wit and devastating honesty.

This book opens by providing the historical context of Plato’s engagement with education, including an overview of Plato’s life as student and educator. The author organizes his discussion of education in the Platonic Corpus around Plato’s images, both the familiar – the cave, the gadfly, the torpedo fish, and the midwife – and the less familiar – the intellectual aviary, the wax tablet, and the kindled fire. These educational images reveal that, for Plato, philosophizing is inextricably linked to learning; that is, philosophy is fundamentally an educational endeavor. The book concludes by exploring Plato’s legacy in education, discussing the use of the “Socratic method” in schools and the Academy’s foundational place in the history of higher education. The characters in Plato’s dialogues often debate – sometimes with great passion – the purpose of education and the nature of learning. The claims about education in the Platonic corpus are so provocative, nuanced, insightful, and controversial that educational philosophers have reckoned with them for millennia.

Bridging the gap between interpretations of "Third Way" Platonic scholarship and "phenomenological-ontological" scholarship, this book argues for a unique ontological-hermeneutic interpretation of Plato and Plato’s Socrates. Reconceptualizing Plato’s Socrates at the Limit of Education offers a re-reading of Plato and Plato’s Socrates in terms of interpreting the practice of education as care for the soul through the conceptual lenses of phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics, and ontological inquiry. Magrini contrasts his re-reading with the views of Plato and Plato’s Socrates that dominate contemporary education, which, for the most part, emerge through the rigid and reductive categorization of Plato as both a "realist" and "idealist" in philosophical foundations texts (teacher education programs). This view also presents what he terms the questionable "Socrates-as-teacher" model, which grounds such contemporary educational movements as the Paideia Project, which claims to incorporate, through a "scripted-curriculum" with "Socratic lesson plans," the so-called "Socratic Method" into the Common Core State Standards Curriculum as a "technical" skill that can be taught and learned as part of the students’ "critical thinking" skills. After a careful reading incorporating what might be termed a "Third Way" of reading Plato and Plato’s Socrates, following scholars from the Continental tradition, Magrini concludes that a so-called "Socratic education" would be nearly impossible to achieve and enact in the current educational milieu of standardization or neo-Taylorism (Social Efficiency). However, despite this, he argues in the affirmative that there is much educators can and must learn from this "non-doctrinal" re-reading and re-characterization of Plato and Plato’s Socrates.